I live for lifes' little challenges! LOL, yeah right!!! I'm just a little crazier than the rest of y'all…

Halloween

The Tall Man has been fighting getting dressed up for like a month, but we all finally convinced him that he needed to get dressed up in order to go out, it took the bartender mom that we see at every junior football game and who runs the place we go (if we don’t go to the other place we go that is…), his best friend promising free drinks and me bringing it up every other day since August, and he finally agreed to get dressed up 6 hours before the Halloween shenanigans were to start… But we got him a costume and a new one for me to boot for under $50 combined.

Here’s how.

Justin Bieber:

A wig from the costume shop, paired with jeans a plain t-shirt, and a solid colored hooded zip-up sweatshirt. Voila! Not to costume, and all we had to buy was the wig.

Sexy firefighter (the hardest part about this costume was finding a costume that would cover both my ass and my boobs, pretty darned hard if we had bought off the shelf!):

A red petticoat skirt and a fire-hat was all we needed ( although I did buy a new pair of fishnets as well, since mine are all packed in a box somewhere waiting for the move (grrr… still no new date). I tied a white mens undershirt into a knot on my back to give it some form, threw on a pair of one of the boys suspenders ( and yes they both have neon green , so I just rocked them) put on the fishnets and my old beat-to-piss Dr. martins ( laces loose and undone) and the petticoat and hat. I think I pulled it off pretty well, every one knew what I was ( it might have helped that it said fireman right on the hat though!

Woo Hoo! 3 costumes down, only 2 to go! Well, for the Handful at least.

#5 is the cutest little owl ever, If I do say so myself. I followed the directions from my inspirational pin for the most part, but I diverged from them towards the end and just hot glued the owl cloak to the hooded sweatshirt I got for her to wear under it so that she could “flap her wings” and added huge eyes and tufty horns as well. Overall I bought 2 yards of fleece for this costume (1/4 yard each brown, pink, and maroon, and 1 1/4 yard pink) @ Walmart for under $3/yard – sorry I lost the receipt already because that is just how super organized I am! and the sweatshirt which is no longer reusable since I glued the whole thing together was $11.97 @ walmart, so still under $20 bucks for this one and I evening of work – maybe an hour and a half? The hood though I had to wait and do the next morning when she was awake to place the eyes properly.

This costume literally cost $5 if I don’t count the 2 – jugs of soda we had to drink! The hardest part was figuring out how to get the water droplets out of the bottles after we rinsed them out. I ended up making a wick out of rolled paper towels and putting it in the bottle and letting it sit over night. I used silver acrylic paint and painted the inside of the bottles by rolling them around rather than the outside so that the paint couldn’t be scratched off, and criss crossed the straps to get away with out using a buckle. Other than that I followed the directions from my Inspiration Pin.

Well, its costume time, that time of year where us parents can either fork out hundreds of dollars for satiny sheets of paper that our kidlets freeze in, rip and look well like everybody elses’ kid out there and like they came out of a box, or to spend hours and hours and attempt to be Martha Stewart and Coco Chanel rolled into one with our sewing machines that collect dust 10 months out of the year and not enough artistic ability to fill up our thumbs while still attempting to do the rest of our lives at the same time. Who has time for that? This year I have decided (thanks to so much inspiration from pinterest) to make all 5 costumes, make them for under $20 each, with little or no sewing (my machine is broken, of course!) and to make them in 2 hours or less.

So luck of the draw meant #4’s costume was first, I wanted to be spooky this year, a perfect funky little witch,

but she hated the idea, and opted to be a peacock instead, but not just any peacock, a purple one…

For her costume I used:

3 yards purple large net tulle ( $0.97/yard @ walmart)

1/2 yard aqua small net tulle ($1.27/yard @ walmart)

1 1/2 yards blue small net tulle ($1.27/yard @ walmart)

2 1/2 yards purple small net tulle ($1.27/yard @ walmart)

1 inch elastic (under $2 for a huge roll @ walmart)

6 sheets of felt ($0.23/each @ walmart)

and a roll of ribbon ( > $3 @ walmart)

So about $15 for this costume. I spent 2 nights doing this the first night was the skirt (look up tutu tutorials for info. Tip: cut elastic 3 inches smaller than the childs chest) for about an hour while watching a movie with The Big Man, and an hour the second night making the felt feathers while he watched football (He tried to help cut out the felt, but his circles weren’t even close to round! lol!) Feather tutorial can be found with our inspiration here. I hot glued ours instead of sewing them.